Enterprise communication centers are often the primary point of contact through which medium- to large-scale enterprises centrally receive, respond to and initiate various types of electronic communications between themselves and individual users, and between themselves and other enterprises. Enterprise communication centers and their technology have a tremendous impact on the conduct of business in today's economy. Enterprise communication centers are used for selling goods and services, as well as for providing customer care, and are a familiar part of the business life of virtually every person in the United States, and increasingly in the rest of the world. The enterprise communication center industry accounts for a significant segment of the U.S. economy, with a recent industry study estimating that more than 5% of the United States' Gross National Product is transacted through formal enterprise communication centers, such as call-centers and email-centers. Further, an estimated installed base of 6,000,000 people in the United States are call-center or email-center agents, constituting the workforce dedicated to handling enterprise communications.
As the volume of electronic communications significantly increases, so has the complexity of handling this traffic through enterprise communication centers. The users that are serviced by enterprise communication centers are extremely diverse. The service provided by the communication center must be customized to each customer. This is especially important since it is currently estimated that more than 80% of incoming communications to an enterprise are generated by less than 20% of the users who are in contact with that enterprise; therefore those users expect to both receive user-customized attention and experience high satisfaction.
One of the primary factors causing the use of electronic communications to proliferate is the advent of personal computers, or “terminals”, combined with improved communications networks such as intranets and the Internet. Such intranets are often proprietary, secure and are, in and of themselves, communicationally isolated from other enterprise intranets; the “Internet”, by contrast, is a vast non-proprietary network composed of thousands of interconnected computers, including serving to openly interconnect separate enterprise intranets. The Internet is made up of large backbone networks (such as MILNET, NSFNET, and CREN), and smaller networks that link to them, together using UNIX utilities such as FTP, Archie, Telnet, Gopher and Veronica to ensure reliable access to the Internet.
The growth in popularity of electronic communications has accompanied a marketplace transition from using an off-line, individual desktop personal computing model to using an on-line, central-server communications model. Specifically, corporations and individual consumers are moving the main functions of storage, access, processing and presentation of their electronic communications from decentralized, unconnected desktop terminals, to centralized databases on servers which service and connect to on-line PCs, known as “client terminals”, via dial-up, leased lines or wireless networks. Further still, these client terminals are proliferating because cost reductions in miniaturizing computer hardware components have led to the widespread use of a new generation of computing devices, known herein as “thin-clients”. These thin-clients are even less expensive and more mobile than traditional desktop terminals and client terminals and include, but are not limited to: wireless pagers; wireless and tethered telephones; network computers; thin-client exercise machines; electronic books; public access kiosks such as automated teller machines, vending machines, airport information terminals and or public kiosks; hand-held personal digital assistants such as Palm Pilots™ and the like; on-line photocopy machines; automobile embedded Internet-connected appliances which download preferred radio stations, seat and temperature adjustments, and the like; thin-client household appliances such as refrigerators, microwaves, and the like; thin-client home entertainment appliances including on-line televisions such as WebTV™, portable digital audio systems such as the Rio™, along with their associated remote controls.
The appeal of these new thin-clients is that they offer the potential for the user to send and receive electronic communications at virtually any time and from virtually anywhere. Many of these lower cost thin-clients access much of their processing and memory capacities on-line from remote servers via private network or public network connections. As a result, billions of new electronic communications are sent and received each year in the United States.
The popularity, complexity and importance of electronic communications has highlighted problems, affecting individual users and enterprise communication centers, which underscore the need for a new computer system and method that can provide convenient, reliable identifications of individual users. A first problem is that, with so many personal computing devices, the user now has user-customized electronic data stored on multiple man-made memory devices, or “tokens”, which the user must manage and possess for storage, access, processing and presentation of their electronic communications. Further, if the user wants all of these new computing tokens to possess the same capabilities with respect to the user's personalized information and customized functions, then the user needs to frequently and redundantly enter all such user-customized data into each token. This is a cumbersome burden which most consumers eschew. If, on the other hand, the user does not effect such redundancies, then losing or damaging their primary personal computing token would be a severe blow. In this instance, or even in the instance where the user loses or damages a computing token with a subset of their information, then months, and perhaps years, of important personal and likely confidential electronic communications are irretrievably lost, or revealed to an untrusted third-party.
A second problem is that enterprise communication centers are overwhelmed by the significant increase in electronic communications. In conventional systems, separate application programs have been developed to service respective users' electronic communications by operators manning the enterprise communication center's operator consoles. Information regarding a customer, or user, has traditionally been obtained manually and embedded into the application programs. Such user-customized data is often stored in a variety of software formats, and also in various electronic files or databases. This occurs because there are many points of contact between an individual user and an enterprise: the user can contact the enterprise by sending emails, making phone calls, or meeting with sales personnel in the field. Further, separate user-customized records are often referenced and stored via various data, such as the user's name, social security number, home phone number, account number, mother's maiden name, email account, or billing address. This process leads to the segmentation and the dispersal of the customer-related data. As such, enterprise communication centers provide enterprise personnel with outdated, conflicting or incomplete customer data. This approach is inefficient and time consuming, and therefore costly. As an example, current industry statistics indicate that for a medium-sized enterprise communication center handling 250,000 messages per year, an increase of just 5 seconds in responding to each message amounts to a cost increase of over $760,000 annually. The enterprise communication center industry has estimated that cost savings of between 30% and 40% can come from automating a higher percentage of communication responses and reducing message volumes to customer representatives by providing more accurate and more customized handling of enterprise communications.
In sum, the increased volume and complexities of electronic communications, prompted in large part by the popularity of personal computing tokens which handle them, has exacerbated dual problems of: user-reliance on particularly vulnerable, customized memory tokens which can be easily damaged, lost or stolen, and; enterprise communication center overloads due handling vast numbers of electronic communications coming from the personal computing tokens. These problems simultaneously underscore the need for a new computer system and method which conveniently and reliably identifies individual users of electronic communications so that: users are relieved of the need to rely on possession of personal computing tokens to conduct their electronic communications, and; enterprise communications handling these electronic communications are able to run more efficiently.
To address the problem of protecting personal computing tokens and the resident electronic communications they contain, the use of various biometrics, such as fingerprints, hand prints, voice prints, retinal images, handwriting samples and the like have been suggested for identification of individuals. However, because the biometrics are generally themselves stored in electronic, and thus reproducible, form on the token itself and because the comparison and verification process is not isolated from the hardware and software directly used by the user attempting access, the problems of fraudulent access and of having to constantly carry these tokens is not alleviated. Further, such systems do not adequately isolate the identity verification process from tampering by someone attempting to gain unauthorized access.
Examples of this token-based biometric approach to system security are described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,821,118 to Lafreniere; U.S. Pat. No. 4,993,068 to Piosenka et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 4,995,086 to Lilley et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,054,089 to Uchida et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,095,194 to Barbanell; U.S. Pat. No. 5,109,427 to Yang; U.S. Pat. No. 5,109,428 to Igaki et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,144,680 to Kobayashi et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,146,102 to Higuchi et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,180,901 to Hiramatsu; U.S. Pat. No. 5,210,588 to Lee; U.S. Pat. No. 5,210,797 to Usui et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,222,152 to Fishbine et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,230,025 to Fishbine et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,241,606 to Horie; U.S. Pat. No. 5,265,162 to Bush et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,321,242 to Heath, Jr.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,325,442 to Knapp; U.S. Pat. No. 5,351,303 to Willmore, all of which are incorporated herein by reference.
An example of a token-based security system which relies on a biometric of a user can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,280,527 to Gullman et al. In Gullman's system, the user must carry and present a credit card sized token (referred to as a biometrics security apparatus) containing a microchip in which is recorded characteristics of the authorized user's voice. In order to initiate the access procedure, the user must insert the token into a terminal such as a public kiosk, and then speak into the terminal to provide a biometrics input for comparison with an authenticated input stored in the microchip of the presented token. The process of identity verification is generally not isolated from potential tampering by one attempting unauthorized access. If a match is found, the remote terminal then signals the host computer that access should be permitted, or prompts the user for an additional code, such as a PIN (also stored on the token), before sending the necessary verification signal to the host computer.
Although Gullman's reliance of comparison of stored and input biometrics potentially reduces the risk of unauthorized access as compared to numeric codes, like personal identification numbers, Gullman's use of the token as the repository for the authenticating data combined with Gullman's failure to isolate the identity verification process from the possibility of tampering greatly diminishes any improvement to fraud resistance resulting from the replacement of a numeric code with a biometrics. Further, the system remains cumbersome and inconvenient to use because it too requires the presentation of a personalized memory token in order to initiate an access request.
To address the problem of enterprise communication centers being overwhelmed by the increase in electronic communications, non-biometric, token-based identification systems have been suggested to encourage more reliable identification of users. One such approach has been to employ a “Caller ID” technology, which uses the originating hardware from which a call is initiated to “identify” the caller. This technique can apply to phone calls, whereby the originating phone number is detected, or it can apply to emails and Internet telephony, from which the originating Internet Protocol (“IP”) address is detected. However, one critical deficit of this attempted solution is that Caller ID does not, in fact, identify the caller at all. Rather, the technology identifies the “token”, or man-made memory device, which an individual uses to initiate the electronic communication. Examples of such tokens include the telephone line or the Internet network address which the user is using. As such, if the individual uses another token, the Caller ID will identify that token differently from the one the individual previously used, even though in actuality the caller is the same person in both cases. This can result in significant confusion and inefficiencies in the handling of electronic communications by enterprise communication centers. This adversely impacts an enterprise's customer-acquisition and customer-retention, which in turn can a significantly negative effect on enterprise revenue and profitability.
Almost uniformly, prior art disclose biometrics are token-based systems and teach away from biometrics recognition without user-dependence on personalized memory tokens. Reasons cited for such teachings range from storage requirements for biometrics recognition systems to significant time lapses in identification of a large number of individuals, even for the most powerful computers.
In view of the foregoing, there has long been a need for a computerized electronic communications system which simultaneously: accommodates the user's need to universally access, process and present their electronic communications with optimal convenience by not requiring the user to possess any man-made memory tokens with resident user-customized data, in order for the user to execute electronic communications, and; increases the accuracy, speed and cost-effectiveness of the handling of these electronic communications by enterprise communication centers.
Further, there is a need for a tokenless computer system which is highly fraud-resistant, and which is centered around the individual themselves by relying solely upon their unique biometric samples. Such a system should be able to function for the user wherever and whenever the user is using any generic on-line computing device, whether a desktop or a thin client, for conducting their electronic communications.
Further, there is a need for a computing system that provides both the user and the enterprise with centralized storage, access, processing and presentation of their electronic communications regardless of whether the personal computing device the user is using possesses only a resident subset of their user-customized data or in fact possesses none of their user-customized data at all. Further, there is a need for a computerized electronic communications system that provides the user with the above benefits whether or not the personal computing device the user is using at any given time contains powerful resident memory and processing capacities, or whether it contains virtually no resident memory and processing capacities. Further, there is a need for a computer system which relieves the user from having to redundantly data-enter and update a variety of individual personal computing devices in order to achieve the same customized performance from any or all of such devices.
There is also a need for a computerized electronic communications system which relieves the user and the enterprise communication center from having to redundantly data-enter their personal demographics and customized electronic communications usage patterns into a variety of databases in order to achieve uniformly customized service. Additionally, there is a need for a computerized electronic communications system which enables a user to benefit from executing customized and complex commands governing their electronic communications regardless of whether the on-line computing device the user happens to be using is a high-powered desktop terminal or whether it is a hand-held, ultra thin-client terminal with virtually no resident computer processing or memory capabilities of its own.
There is further a need for a computerized electronic communications system which centrally stores user-customized data regardless of the many points of contact between an individual user and an enterprise: whether the user contacts the enterprise by sending emails, making phone calls, or meeting with sales personnel in the field. There is also a need for a system that enables enterprise communication centers to: provide enterprise personnel with current, complete and accurate user-customized data; automate a higher percentage of communication responses; reduce message volumes to customer representatives.
There is also a need for an electronic communications system that uses a strong link to the person being identified, as opposed to merely verifying a user's possession of any physical objects that can be freely transferred.
There is a further need for an electronic communications system that ensures user convenience by enabling user-authorization without requiring the user to possess, carry, and present one or more proprietary memory tokens, such as man-made user-customized portable memory devices, in order to effect electronic communications. Anyone who has lost a smart card or a traditional notebook personal computer, left it at home, had it damaged or stolen knows well the keenly and immediately-felt inconvenience caused by such problems. Therefore, there is a need for an electronic biometric communications system that is entirely tokenless.
There is another need in the industry for a computerized electronic communications system that is sufficiently versatile to accommodate both users who desire to use personal identification codes (PICs), being alphabetical, numerical or graphical, for added security and also consumers who prefer not to use them.
Lastly, such a system must be affordable and flexible enough to be operatively compatible with existing networks having a variety of electronic communication devices and system configurations.